The Bioconductor project provides an open resource for the development and distribution of innovative reliable software for computational biology and bioinformatics. The range of available software is broad and rapidly growing as are both the user community and the developer community. The project maintains a web portal for delivering software and documentation to end users as well as an active mailing list. Additional services for developers include a software archive, mailing list and assistance and advice program development and design [unreadable] [unreadable] We propose an active development strategy designed to meet new challenges while simultaneously providing user and developer support for existing tools and methods. In particular we emphasize a design strategy that accommodates the imperfect, yet evolving nature of biological knowledge and the relatively rapid development of new experimental technologies. Software solutions must be able to rapidly adapt and to facilitate new problems when they arise. [unreadable]